feel her pulse stop throbbing so and the dull aching at her temples little
by little pass away. She played like this so many nights. Soon she would be
ready for sleep.

* * * * *

After she had gone to bed, Roger rose heavily from his chair. By long habit
he went about the house trying the windows and turning out lights. Last he
came to the front door. There were double outer doors with a ponderous
system of locks and bolts and a heavy chain. Mechanically he fastened them
all; and putting out the light in the hall, in the darkness he went up the
stairs. He could so easily feel his way. He put his hand lightly, first on
the foot of the banister, then on a curve in it halfway up, again on the
sharper curve at the top and last on the knob of his bedroom door. And it
was as though these guiding objects came out to meet him like old friends.

In his bedroom, while he slowly undressed, his glance was caught by the
picture upon the wall opposite his bed, a little landscape poster done in
restful tones of blue, of two herdsmen and their cattle far up on a
mountainside in the hour just before the dawn, tiny clear-cut silhouettes
against the awakening eastern sky. So immense and still, this birth of the
day--the picture always gave him the feeling of life everlasting. Judith
his wife had placed it there.

From his bed through the window close beside him he looked up at the
cliff-like wall of the new apartment building, with tier upon tier of
windows from which murmurous voices dropped out of the dark: now soft, now
suddenly angry, loud; now droning, sullen, bitter, hard; now gay with
little screams of mirth; now low and amorous, drowsy sounds. Tier upon tier
of modern homes, all overhanging Roger's house as though presently to crush